Kennedy Center Schedules Free Concerts

CARL HARTMAN

Published
7:00 pm EST, Wednesday, March 5, 2003

Associated Press Writer

A new series of free concerts _ jazz, opera and classical _ by students of America's leading music schools will start next year at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where seats for regular programs can cost well into three digits.

Performers in "The Conservatory Project" will be students at eight training centers that produce some of the world's top artists, from the Juilliard School in New York to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The first weeklong series starts May 24, 2004, and will be repeated in following years in the late winter and late spring.

Music directors Placido Domingo of the Washington Opera and Leonard Slatkin of the National Symphony Orchestra will offer reviews of the student performers.

Programs will take place in the center's Terrace Theater. The center's continuing free programs, called the Millennium Stage, are set up in the Grand Foyer, its long lobby along the Potomac, dominated by the sculptured head of President Kennedy.

The Millennium Stage gives a performance every day of the year at 6 p.m. and celebrates its sixth anniversary this month. It has presented nearly 20,000 performers from all 50 states and from foreign countries, recruited through embassies in Washington.

Earlier this week, Colombian musicians Andrea Echeverri and Hector Buitrago drew an audience of 2,000 for the mix of rock, pop, and folklore that won them the 2001 Latin Grammy for best rock album.

Other conservatories in the new project are the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester in Rochester, N. Y., the Peabody Conservatory of Music at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the School of Music at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind. and the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Houston.